Normally, if you want a professionally designed, custom-built website for your new virtual assistant business, you should be prepared to spend at least a few hundred dollars.

But, all that can change if you know where to find the best deals and the best designs for the lowest price.

First, it costs more to have a brick-and-mortar company design a website for you. Have you seen those newspaper ads that offer a 5-page website for $500? These are probably companies with physical locations. They have to charge more simply to pay for their overhead: office rent, designers' wages, advertising costs and so on.

Therefore, it would be wise to use a virtual assistant (VA) instead! As you already know, VAs often work from home so they do not have high operating costs like a big company does. On the other hand, a VA will be able to design images with quality similar to (or better than!) those of designers from big companies.

However, choose your VA with care. The best way to find the right VA for your project would be to go to visit the website of a VA association. There you can post your RFP (request for proposal) and have hundreds of talented VAs bid on your project, so you will get the best deal. You will also be able to choose your designer based on her experience, past transactions and client testimonials, so your value for money is secured.

Another route you can take is to purchase the Virtual Business Startup System, created by Tawnya Sutherland. It comes with several beautiful, easy to use templates, perfectly suited for a new VA. The templates are easy to edit wth the help of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) programs such as Microsoft Frontpage, Macromedia Dreamweaver and so on.

Functions are used to perform a well defined task that is normally repeated at various places within a web site, web application, or other software application. The function sometimes needs certain information before performing its task, and sometimes returns a value to the calling page or program.

An example of how to use a simple function in PHP:

 function showMessage() {
echo "{$_SESSION["message"]}"; }

The above example shows a very simple function that displays the contents of a session variable called 'message'. The idea being that while a user is using a web site, etc, various messages are generated and stored in the 'message' session variable. Whenever the showMessage function is called, the contents of the session variable are displayed. So, for example, when the user logs on, you could display a message saying that they have done so. Likewise, when they log off, a different message could be displayed.

Calling a function

To call the showMessage function, you would just need to include the line:

showMessage()

in the web page (wrapped in php tags to distinguish it from normall HTML).

Passing values to a function

Often, a function requires one or more input values in order to perform its task. For example, take the following example that takes two numbers as input, and adds them together. The result is then returned to the calling web page or program.

function addNumbers($number1,$number2) {
$answer = $number1 + $number2;
return $answer; }

In the calling program we would have something similar to the following:

$number1 = "5";
$number2 = "6";
$sumOfNumbers = addNumbers($number1,$number2);
echo "$sumOfNumbers";

Obviously, in a real program you would not have the numbers hardcoded like this, but they would be obtained from user input or by some other means. Notice also that although the name of the returned variable is $answer, the calling program makes no reference to that. We could, if we wanted to, change the calling program to:

$answer = addNumbers($number1,$number2);
echo "$answer";

which might make things slightly easier to understand.

Launched on November 2005, Google Analytics was an instance hit to all webmaster around the planet. Giving millions of people the capability to learn more about the web surfers that wandered through their website, the revolutionary service provide by the behemoth, Google incorporated, changed the way webmasters gathered and interpreted information from their websites. By simply adding a HTML code onto every web page that you want to track, you can gain insight on the behavior of your visitors and more.

So how do you use Google Analytics? Though most have a limited understanding of the service, many still remain in the dark on how to use key features and just how to interpret the data. Are you finding yourself in that position? Well if you are, you are in need of some Google Analytics training. With that said, allow me to teach you some very basic ways to interpret some of the information provided by the service.

One common mistake multitudes of people make when interpreting the reports section is the differences between page views and page/visit. Some just don't know what page/visit is and fewer don't know exactly what page views are. Very simply, page views are the number of times your visitors have viewed the pages on your website. Please keep in mind that page views and visits are also different as well. One visitor can view many of your web pages before leaving. Your reports can tell you that you've had one visitor and six page views. That tells you that the visitor saw six of your web pages before leaving. The page/visit metric is an average of all your visitors and all your page views. It tells you how many pages each of your visitors on average viewed before leaving your website. The page views and page/visit are very simple, yet very powerful metrics that will help you keep track on your website's performance.

Even though that is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to getting the full Google Analytics training, the basic information I provided should have opened up your eyes to see the value that Google Analytics provides. Before you even think about using this service make sure that you get complete training so that you can get the most out of it.